SECRETS & JOURNEYS: Aspects of surrealist organising and integrity

SECRETS & JOURNEYS Aspects of surrealist organising and integrity Four essays winter 2020-2021 Mattias Forshage

All texts by Mattias Forshage Cover: Steven Cline 2019 ISBN 978-1-105-70942-5 SECRETS AND JOURNEYS Aspects of surrealist organising and integrity

by Mattias Forshage Peculiar Mormyrid Press Print on demand Graphic form: Steven Cline and Mattias Forshage

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TABLE OF CONTENTS No secrets of a walk across the bog. . . . . . . . . . . . 6 A league of departure; Basis of surrealism, phylogenetically and ontogenetically . . . . . . . . . . . 19 The concept of the surrealist group . . . . . . . . . . . 37 A blistering blueprint torn from several angles; Open letter to academic students of surrealism. . . . . . . . . . . . 61

INTRODUCTION In a way, these four texts from an unusually bleak and lonely winter are just four facets reflecting the same basic points, partly even openly repeating the same basic points, that have been made elsewhere anyway.

Any reader will find at least some of these points quite redundant, some perhaps most of them. That’s what you get for revealing secrets and talking about basics.

It’s all rather obvious and there is nothing really to boast about, and it’s all interconnected. And while surrealism remains in the service of poetry and the unknown, those entities typically do not wait for rationalisations and are not dependent as such of how we choose to defend and explore them. Nevertheless, it has been characteristic for surrealism through its history to use an integrative approach, never standing in passive deference but shamelessly poking and playing and exploring and trying to understand and not backing from fisticuffs.

(Bibliographical note: The first essay was written for the Liverpool journal ’Patastrophe!, which has still not yet appeared with a new issue since. The concluding essay was posted on the Peculiar Mormyrid blog (peculiarmormyrid.com/blogs) in march 2021 and raised a little bit of a stir, but perhaps far less controversy than might have been expected.)

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NO SECRETS OF A WALK ACROSS THE BOG Maybe there is no such things as secrets. Everything lies before us.

It is not about being told or not. Poetry is poetry.

It’s thick with secrets, all of which move towards being revealed, and never disarmed by being revealed. Surrealism is a secret doctrine, and yet it has been laid out rather accurately in books (a few of them), books that have even been widely distributed. Do they make it understood? Hardly. The more accurate an explanation is, the more it seems to speak to the already knowing, and is redundant in this sense. And still, people keep discovering surrealism, and keep reinventing activities in its spirit, under its name or not. Why would they? While maybe surrealism is obsolete (it isn’t). Does it do anything at all right now? Where shall we look?

The international surrealist movement does exist, but sometimes gives the impression of having been reduced to advertising each others’ publications online. Meanwhile, experimentation continues in the villages. Surrealism will not be hurried, but it keeps growing back its hydra heads in new locations and partly new forms. That was one of the secrets, that every instance needed to invent its own mode of existence somehow.

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Maybe there is no such thing as secrets. Or at least, secrets cannot be betrayed by being revealed. I suppose anthropologically the crucial thing about secrets is who gets to share them with whom under what circumstances (and who betrays them how). It’s not the secrets themselves. We can speak freely. As all students of alchemy know, the philosopher’s stone is at our feet and is being trampled on a daily basis. The hermetic philosophers were, admittedly, often obsessed with it being secret and needing to be shrouded in allegory and dazzling imagery. But that was more of an exercise in vision and interpretation, and it remained fully possible also to speak plainly, because you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference unless you were able to see for yourself. We can talk about the secrets of surrealism, and you’d still need a particular framework to make sense of it, a particular framework in which it makes sense of your own poetic experience.

If academic students of surrealism may perhaps seem to betray these ideas, it is not because they are revealing the secret but perhaps more because they never grasped it. Or maybe they did and are either disastrously naïve or terribly dishonest about the extent to which it can be respected or conveyed in that particular context. That whole apparatus depends on delimiting and reducing its topic so that it can be claimed to be properly represented within the framework of a particular discipline (usually but not always the good old art or literature). Indeed 8

scientific rationality is about reducing away that which is non-essential in order to reveal unexpected connections, and with a highly complex or even secret topic, you can start peeling away, and go on for some time, and what you are left with in the end is a small chewy rest which is not at all what it was all about. Since what it was about had to do with the complexity of the vastly cross-disciplinary framework and historical connotations (this is what scholars perhaps should be able to discern but typically aren’t), the totality of the associations (this is the basic function of poetry), the emergent effects (this is the basic function of poetry and dialectics), and the immediate usefulness in terms of changing everyday life (this is the basics of radical thinking as epitomised in Marx’s eleventh Feuerbach thesis, which is directly contrary to the academics’ aim for grants for subsistence). The secret is still unrevealed. We can keep talking about it.

Surrealist activity keeps popping up. Surrealist collectivity is crucial to surrealist activity, they overlap widely and seem at times to be identical (they aren’t, really). Surrealist groups can’t be emphasised enough when discussing surrealism. On the other hand, in most connections the concept does not need to be defined, and we don’t need to indulge in questions of circumscription. There are “typical” patterns and core examples, sure, but since it rests on a need to reinvent its forms, there will be numerous exceptions, there will be many instances that are perhaps difficult to 9

recognise as such, and there will be several instances which do not even care all that much for the label, or will care too much for it and say something more or less misleading instead just to be on the safe side.

I will take the opportunity to briefly emphasise a few key aspects.

A collective has to discover ways of communicating, to a very small extent through pragmatism but much more importantly through play, drifting, experiment, confrontation and chance. It brings together quite different experiences, different sensibilities, and not the least different strains of unusual knowledge, and it needs to invent a platform for itself to confront and alloy them and make something quite different out of them. You need to look each other into the eyes while your soul is being offered as part of the feast.

The importance of a geographical base can’t be emphasised enough these days. The possibility of intersecting trajectories was always an important aspect of the intensification of chance in an urban setting. Cities have their histories, and more importantly their hidden histories. They have their atmospheres, and their hidden atmospheres. Doing strange things in familiar environments reveals other possibilities, and brings out the “genius loci” for an actual dialogue.

The genius loci, the spirit of a place, can probably be accurately described as the emergent objective organism of the trajectory intersections a place has magnetically attracted. It is its long story. Playing 10

games, disenveloping impromptu mythologies, walking aimlessly, following inventory loops, reveals a place and adds to it. The genius loci may become a parent of an emergent objective spirit of a collective.

Since the dynamics of the surrealist activity would sooner or later collectivise subjectivity in a weird sense.

Maybe we think we are being silly or tipsy, and maybe we just assume someone else is driving, but the glass is probably moving over the board by itself. Surrealist games and deliria systematise this, the results reveal a voice and a personality which is different from the sum of the contributors. Already the rimbaldian insistence on the mediality of poetry emphasised how poetic sensbility is based in some other faculty than the individual mind. And players of surrealist games play with this. Sure, people will write their own texts too, and suggest iniatitives individually, but eventually no one will be able to be quite sure who did what, and where actually all this came from. We could refer to it, if we like, as the objective spirit of the particular collectivity. It is a monstrous kind of being, with rather oblique intentions, and it is being fuelled by each participant’s particular capabilities, modes of association, and unusual education, combined into something which is more than a sum. It needs its bowl of porridge or it might get stingy.

Playing games is a core of surrealist collective activity, but anything can become a game in a surrealist collective setting. Let’s just emphasise that 11

interpretation and analysis can be basic creative functions somewhat similar to drawing and writing, and that sounds and movements may make a lot of sense also in everyday settings (regardless of whether called musicking and dancing or not), and that simple associative deliria with at least a bit of the pertinent vigilance for actual openings easily become games even if they may be difficult to pin down. Other games may be more like research projects, only without the framework of an institutional discipline and without the compulsion for published results.

A rather crucial aspect is of course integrity, that which has been called the security of the spirit. We don’t need to go into details here. But no doubt as the regular support functions of society are being dismounted one by one it becomes rather crucial with whom one will be left standing touching shoulders under the bugles of apocalypse – one would need the forum of deep experimentation to be also a forum of mutual solidarity. And the immature spirit awoken will need its demarcations; it won’t be possible to keep adapting to opportunities that are being offered in order to fulfill others expectancies. It’ll be necessary to shape one’s own forums, turn down requests, and reshape them to quests that will forward one’s own desires and curiousnesses. One could get far by trusting chance and intuition, but the nature of the quest will also present a challenge and it will be necessary to address challenges between contributors

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as individuals. Then, we don’t have secrets so we’re actually not that afraid of spies. But forwarding poetry is a grave task. Just because one might be laughing a lot, this doesn’t mean that playing games is not deadly serious.

But the one secret that I would like to emphasise (empirically and instinctively) is that walking often turns out to be one of the most basic and most pregnant activities. Alone or in groups, delirically or systematically investigatingly, providing a wealth of significant details as well as a series of ambiances for the associative deliria and the poetic sensibilties to play with. The walking group, with no one leading, is emblematic for an investigative game, moving in mysterious ways as an overindividual entity within its natural environment its particular city. Walking is, I would suggest, the most basic surrealist activity of all.

It is perhaps easy to fall into the rhetorics of claiming that this is all nothing particular. Is it? I bore myself with repeating basics. Am I? What surrealism is about is basically poetry, and everything profound that can be said about poetry actually concerns surrealism, and surrealism is just one particular historical tradition of exploring poetry, highlighting poetry, investigating the conditions for poetry, and defending the rights of poetry.

This seems to the surrealists, basically, to actualise everything that is the most crucial of human existence (and even of existence without a confinement

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to what is human, since poetry will not stop at questioning the boundaries of the non-human).

Naturally, it will also adress many of those things which are most crucial to social existence, since yes, social existence too is about addressing the human condition and the unknown. Social life is more crudely pragmatic in the sense that we often disconsider some things on the basis of what works and what doesn’t.

But surrealist activity shares with any more profound addressals of social existence a certain ludic, experimental and investigative attitude. Everyday games are actually not there to make things go smooth but to open up for new possibilities. We may get somewhere all the time when we cease to avoid those routes that seem to not work, in order to poke them, confuse them, confront them, rattle them. To invite chance, to invite silence, to invite random messages.

In this way, surrealism perhaps really is nothing particular. But still we have this particular historical phenomenon of a historical tradition embodied in a movement and its experience and in a corpus of theory under this name, along with an accompanying vast body of art, literature and other cultural artifacts which are more or less dependent on it but can be appreciated without understanding of this fact. And it keeps emphasising the basic facts of poetry, play, adventure and nonconformism when many others don’t. It’s all very simple and at the same time it isn’t. Since it needs to be constantly

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reinvented, and it needs to reinvent its necessary refusals and points of departures.

But the basics are all there, in plain sight, for anyone to reconstruct on their own. There is a lot that we need to remind ourselves, over and over again. There is a stream of continuous new compromises that rest on forgetting, succumbing to a pessimistic interpretation of circumstances. Pointing out the obvious isn’t so bad.

If it’s obvious, that’s great. Then we can start speaking about that which is actually interesting, which is what we don’t yet know.

It is christmas eve and earlier today I took a walk.

As I was crossing a frostbitten bog I noticed the withered cloudberry leaves lying on top of the sphagnum moss tussocks, looking very unfamiliar. What was unfamiliar about them was the colour, the leave surfaces had turned a bright liver-brown and the the frostbitten edges where creamy yellow-white. It didn’t look like cloudberry leaves at all, it looked more like perhaps felty dog lichens. The liverbrown colour made me think of Liverpool. And cloudberries often make me think of secrets. (Well, most people in this part of this country just don’t know that cloudberries are common around here. Most people just spend too little time walking in bogs. Cloudberries are precious, the “gold of the forest”. They can be picked.

But actually in far fewer places than where they are common, because around here a majority of bogs have only male clones that never fruit.) There was this

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visit to Liverpool some years ago. There were things to say about it. Travelling seems like a long forlorn life.

And that I had recently entered into discussion with new contacts in Liverpool and said I might contribute something to their journal. But had been unable to feel that I really wanted to say very much.

And I remembered a phrase, “A secret better than journeys”, which I think was a Belgian surrealist shortstory in translation in one of Michael Richardson’s shortstory anthologies (I can’t find it now though). It rang weirdly at this time, when travelling is something one so desperately yearns for, how can a secret be better than journeys? But I remember having understood this back when I first read it. Which was before I started travelling widely. These days, I might be more prone to talk about journeys better than secrets. And if a secret is good enough, it is because it implies a journey of sorts. But wait, once the terms are up on the table, then it’s probably not the journey that is good about a journey, but the change in framework that allows you to make new experiences and new friendships that represent secrets. A good journey is a secret better than journeys. It is not secret, it is already there in the itinerary.

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A LEAGUE OF DEPARTURE

BASIS OF SURREALISM, PHYLOGENETICALLY AND ONTOGENETICALLY Surrealism rests on a break. This is its very basis.

Though one can’t say that this has been sufficiently understood. Absolutely not by its external commentators (critics and academics) and sometimes not even by many of its actual practitioners.

It was born out of departure historically and it implies a departure for each newcomer individually.

Phylogenesis and ontogenesis, if you will. Separated in time and scale, there is an important analogy between them.

Or, if disregarding symmetry, surrealism rests on a departure on several levels which could be conceptualised and delimited in a number of different ways.

The whole framework has its foundations on the other side of a departure from the utilistic, economic, obedient or conformist mode of the society around it. No one happily ends up in surrealism as a career opportunity, or a practical choice among several, of fulfilling the expectancies of that society upon them.

Then surrealism as such took shape through a whole series of departures from such preconceived roles and specialised spheres in society. Then surrealism in each country, and surrealism in each city, and surrealism in each circle, keeps making such departures from the preconceived alternatives, integrated forums, available 19

alternatives and timely trends of each social situation, both historically and in the form of the partaking individuals, who depart in different ways from their expected trajectories and the loyalties with the available integrative connections like family, nation, class, culture, subculture, trade…

(In its conceptualisation of the break, surrealism has not been using the “tabula rasa” nor the “exodus” which seemed like onedimensional and non-dialectical tropes, but usually the “rupture” and the “coupure” and the “departure”, and occasionally the “clinamen” and the “sublation” and the “leap”. Each of these tropes, or words, might require a small study of its own, for which this is not the place.)

The genius of controversial evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel was largely in his immense stubbornness and incapability of dialectical thinking. If he saw a pattern, he assumed it must be universal and proclaimed it a law of nature. If he saw an odd emergent phenomenon he assumed it must be universal too and actually be present everywhere else too but to a lesser degree. When he saw intelligence in humans and well knew that there was no such thing as a god or a mysterious soul, he concluded that all animals think, and since animals are made of matter, actually all matter thinks, to some extent. When he saw that embryonal development in animals goes through phases that resemble the groundplans of earlier forms of animals, he formulated this as a “biogenetic law” and claimed

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that each individual actually lives through a recapitulation of its lifeform’s whole evolution back from the origin of life. Ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis.

Even if his specific claims are far from true in the scientific framework, there is clearly such a pattern at work and as a pattern it works in many other settings too. Individual discoveries of something often (but far from always) repeat the historical discoveries of the same thing. Many a psychologist made a big issue of this.

It occurs with surrealism too. In a way, we have to reinvent surrealism individually. Depending on the setting, we may need to pass through some of its early phases. Individually or in small groups, if we happen to start out from a comfortable position, we may need to first abandon faith in the righteousness, legitimacy, well-meaning and problem-solving capacity of bourgeois society, capitalism, nations, family, patriarchy and religion. Thus we may find ourselves avantgardists, believing that taking part in front-edge minority culture may liberate us from many of the ills and limitations of that society and be a permanent manifestation of a remedy. So then we’ll need to despair about that, and see that avantgarde culture serves as both an elitist embellishment within that society and in parts a useful token opposition against it, and that many people active in there are quite content with having a function, if precarious, in society. And maybe it needs to be pointed out explicitly that this goes for

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underground culture too, it’s very much the same thing, if just perhaps slightly less fancy, but nevertheless largely the contemporary incarnation or late child of avantgardism. (As an additional phase, at that stage, we may perhaps turn to political activism, which at first seems like a more clean break with the loyalties to the surrounding order. But then we discover how political activism is partly an avantgarde culture and a token opposition too, and just how destructive its focus on pragmatism, tactics, public attention and shortterm accomplishments may be, and how distractive from longterm goals its expectancies of sacrifice, discipline and postponing the realisation of desire.)

Surrealism does not implant itself as a coherent whole in someone’s life or someone’s mind. Each individual is attracted to it from a particular angle, a particular sphere of activity, and initially may see all the other types of things that surrealists are doing as less relevant to that perceived core. In that sense, confrontation with others who have been attracted by surrealism too, seeing their often widely divergent trajectories, is highly crucial and necessitates moving ahead. And not mainly in the form of generalising or compromising, making surrealism a quirky chimaera of whatever parts has attracted one’s friends to it.

There might be parts of that too, but the main thing is the emergent whole that combines all these sides as different guises, but that is out of any individual’s control and will surprise everyone at times, and will

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take its detailed shape only through the shared experience, of going through experiments, adventures, drifts and fights, good and bad experiences together.

Maybe trying out some good faith and some alliances with available forms of resistance and available popular forums along the route. Probably experiencing the need to depart from their framework of mind, but then maintaining (or not) the alliance or the contact as such, just having realised that surrealism is something different than what is implemented in all these available networks. That surrealism needs to be reinvented.

And this even more in each and every activity than in each and every individual. Because the activity will involve the individual and create experiences and take steps into new phases and have a sense of emergent dynamics of their own, to a larger extent than individuals will. Many of these crucial experiences will be weird, unpredictable and particular, while many others will be quite similar to those of early surrealist history, with ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.

Let me just emphasise once more that surrealist activity tends to demand a departure in each individual from their individual specialisations. This usually occurs more or less spontaneously, but there are also cases of massive inertia in this respect. Such a resistance is usually manifested in a very lowkey way, so that it does not quite seem obvious that the activity is actually making more profound demands on the contributors, instead seemingly allowing them to stay

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within their preconceived frames of mind. The effect in that case is that the activity as such is not allowed to take off and assume an emergent direction that is perhaps most easily described as “a life of its own”, and sometimes in only seemingly more esoteric terms (actually philosophically straightforward) as an “objective spirit”.

It’s in fact very simple. Painters who are attracted to surrealism and expects it to be a vehicle to forward their own painting and the framework around that, activists who are attracted to surrealism and expect it to be a vehicle to continue their activism, historians who are attracted to surrealism and expect it to be a vehicle to feed them with history, friends who are attracted to surrealism and expect it to be a forum for good company, mutual support and entertaining events, surrealismophiles who are attracted to surrealism and expect to find merely fellow admirers of the classic great names – they all are going to have to be disappointed, and realise that surrealist activity is not there to fulfill anyone’s preconceived expectancies of it. There is a threshold, it demands a certain leap, of frame of mind and out of the comfort zone, it’s going to have to be weird for everybody.

Surrealist comrades and surrealist activity has a life of its own and it will in one way or another probably richly reward you, but largely by confusing you and pulling you along where you didn’t know you were going. You may continue with your own speciality or

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your weapon of choice (like painting, writing poems, dancing, musicking, philosophising, historiography or activism) but the concerns that frame it within surrealism are not the same ones that framed it in the cultural setting, in the specialised forums, in the outside world.

You just need to face it, arriving in surrealism you will hardly be able to just keep doing what you were doing, and for the reasons you were content with. In that sense, the role of the surrealist organisers or network nodes that are already there, includes to disappoint the newcomers while pulling them into something else (maybe seductively, maybe harshly, maybe involontarily). And make experiences together, and see the objective spirit slowly shapeshift along its prowl through the silent landscape of irrelevant noise.

You probably know the story. Surrealism is based in the first world war avantgarde or high modernism rejection of faith in contemporary society, but it took its point of origin in something different than the avantgarde quest for novelty and rapid development.

It founded itself on the experience back in 1919 of methods and states of mind that seemed to make obsolete the specialised worlds of bourgeois culture and specifically of writing (and eventually visual art). Nevertheless, surrealism worked within the avantgarde for a few years, until it finally broke away from it. It can perhaps best be described a succession of steps rather than a single decisive break: perhaps starting with the very conceptualisation of “the surrealist revolution” in

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1924 as something that would overthrow the civilised order and categories, and then the ultraradical statements of no return in the Declaration of 27 jan 1925, and finally the practical break with the social milieu of the avantgarde with the scandal on the Saint Pol Roux banquet in july 1925.

If single surrealists have taken one or several steps back from that leap since, this is either a matter of their individual conscience or a matter of tactics within surrealist activity under particular circumstances, it is not a matter of a retreat on behalf of surrealism, which remains founded on this break.

So surrealism, in terms of contents, was discovered in 1919 and took several years to find its historical, theoretical and organisational form between 1922 and 1925. An important thing came inbetween: the Dada movement. Surrealism was not born out of Dada.

The basic ingredients were there before the founders of surrealism came to Dada, these ingredients came from postsymbolism or were discovered de novo, but the core players took a detour into Dada for a few years, and then bounced back. Dada was the negatively formulated summit of the avantgarde, and Dada experience certainly contributed to surrealism, both in positive and negative terms. Surrealism definitely incorporated the experience of Dada, but just how crucial it actually was can be debated, and it’s easy to come up with arguments on both sides. My point is that the official historiography is simply mistaken in

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this basic point: Surrealism did not come out of Dada, surrealism was substantially there before Dada, and Dada was, for the surrealists, an experiment within surrealism as it was taking its shape, before surrealism found its lasting form.

Sure, these earliest days of surrealism included a certain exalted expectancy concerning “the new spirit”. And this, probably, is the core of the sense of the avantgarde, rather than the alleged “tabula rasa with tradition” that probably hardly ever existed except as a rhetorical figure. However, for surrealism this obviously lead, within just a few years, to the necessity of a break with the avantgarde as such, to a revision of the sense of rupture, and to a continuous emphasis on tradition. It is, no doubt, one of surrealism’s most basic tools as well as one of its most obvious achievements to have discovered and thereby constructed (constructed and thereby discovered) its own tradition of visionaries and rebels. Through an emphasis on poetry as such, as well as through the hermetic tradition and certain esoteric disciplines more than others, it has put itself in the service of a more timeless task than contemporary impact. And in its special sense of being a movement it has turned its trust to this continuity of experience, of nonconformist and poetic experience.

So yes, surrealism rests on that feeling described as central in early 20th century high modernism that bourgeois civilisation is obsolete, its order crumbling and its values fake. But the surrealists discovered that

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playing the avantgarde became a court jester role within that same cultural order, and it seemed necessary with a more profound nonconformism which stretched out a hand across time, as well as a less profound but more operational nonconformism that worked practically for the abolition of the foundations of this world order through social revolution.

But the latter provided some fundamental disappointments too.

Since surrealism’s political project is often misunderstood, it is often misunderstood specifically how it relates to its early development and to its sense of departure. Many people believe that when the French surrealists cut their final relations with the communist party in 1935, surrealism also abandoned communism and even politics altogether for all future. Obviously, this is historically wrong. History is full of funny anecdotes, partly instructive and partly just depressing, of how surrealism has kept looking for its political project ever since, regardless of whether tailending other initiatives and revolts, tiresome bickering over anarchism versus trotskyism, or trying to define its own original contribution. The examples are legion. But, still it does remain a basic fact that surrealism did rupture from the playground of traditional revolutionary politics just like it ruptured from the playground of the art world, and keeps doing it over again. If many of its practitioners and collectives from the 60s on have been rooted in political activism, this is just an

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excellent illustration to the most basic-level lesson that surrealism is not an art movement, that it can be rediscovered and reinvented from many different angles, and that it remains an odd creature that will seem to span many of the categories of cultural associations since it does not regard itself as part of any of them and will keep drifting and dreaming and yelling independently of them.

Another question related to this is that many ex-surrealists and some who still considers themselves surrealists, especially in France, believe that collectivity too was subtracted from the surrealist project when Jean Schuster personally decided to disband the then semidysfunctional Paris group in 1969. Obviously, the surrealists in the rest of the world didn’t think so, surrealist activity continued, and groupuscules abounded and sometimes started flowing back together again even in France.

Because collectivity remains crucial for the surrealist project. This is true in itself, and it is also true because it is extremely difficult for a lone individual to remain a surrealist without slipping back into the civilised variety of framing creativity and experiment – as a specialised activity for the privileged in a cultural sector that is a “soft” segment of the capitalist labor market and commodity market and of current states’ national pride and overall civilised ideology, and which is properly measured in awards, grants and number of publications and properly confirmed in the

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eventual grace extended by official critics and academics. This is a pre-break, pre-surrealist framework for creativity and experiment. It is different from our task, it is lesser, and it is truly unworthy, considering the desires, claims and actual experiences made so far…

But the break with the avantgarde is definitely a problem for historiography when tracing surrealism’s implementations in different countries. Because in so many places, surrealism was imported as the high point of the avantgarde and not as something that had broken with the avantgarde. This is what creates the oh so confusing historiographies of for example Spanish surrealism, where local historiography has defined an indigenous surrealism independent of the international current, where surrealism is something quite different from the originally French and then international actual movement in its postavantgarde and let’s say esoteric guise.

We will have to start looking, in each country, for the point where the local surrealism enthusiasts actually broke with their own avantgarde. And for the longest of time, they didn’t in places like Spain, Romania, Sweden, not even Czechoslovakia, all places where surrealism long remained a personal taste and a very advanced modernist chapter side by side with the other currents. While in many places in South America, as well as in Yugoslavia, there were clear elements of this break, but often more just assumed, copying the French example rather than emerging from local

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development. Other places like Japan and Belgium are complex and contradictory, difficult to squeeze into an expositional example. I mean, it would have been easy if the break was easily spotted by coinciding with the explicit proclamation of a surrealist group, but this is clearly often not the case. It seems like at least some groupuscules of for example Belgians and Czechs and Romanians were on the other side of the fence already before such proclamations, whereas for example the English surrealists don’t seem to have taken the leap until several years after the founding of the group…

What we’re looking for is instances where the local cultural revolters chose surrealism as a vehicle to break with their own avantgarde position, rather than as their own marketing brand on the cultural market within the avantgarde. Usually, this led to contradictions, which have continued to arise up until the present, since many surrealists still wanted to be fed by the cultural world and thus kept working within it, but so to speak with their mind outside. In theory this is hypocrisy and a huge problem, in practice not necessarily so. Also, surrealists were typically also curious to go looking for those loners within the art world who were actually rather psychonauts and poetic explorers and who would “fit better” in a meaningful context such as surrealism than in a blurred soup of a market sector such as the art world – and a few took the leap aboard whereas many others stayed with one leg on the shore.

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Since the 60s, surrealist activity typically does not have its basis anymore in avantgarde aspirations at all.

But what has it broken away from, and what does it need to break away from now? First, the official art and literature worlds of today are hardly avantgardistic, second, it’s not within the the art and literature worlds that surrealist activities are born. It’s rather in underground art and activist environments. If the underground art world definitely has some avantgarde aspirations and characteristics, and the activist sphere too according to reasonable interpretations, it’s still in their outskirts or exceptions that surrealism is usually discovered. It may be artists who want to become activists but not typical activitists, or activists who want to become artists but not typical artists. If surrealist activities still maintain ties within both these worlds, surrealism as such does not function within them.

Individual practitioners of surrealism may be professionals or semiprofessionals who fight for grants and commissions, artists who will exhibit and sell works in galleries, writers who write contracts with publishers, but this is not what constitutes their surrealist activity.

Surrealism, even where it concerns surrealist art, is mostly in its own forums, globally and locally. Globally an international network that seems at times to lack any solid foundation but has its journals, online meeting points, and occasional international exhibitions. Locally typically more of an underground art type of presence, paying visits in the local venues and

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maybe even the art galleries but being a bit of uncomfortable exotic birds there. Of course, any types of alliances and communities may be worth trying out.

And evaluated in a forum and a state of mind where the farreaching claims of surrealism are remembered and not compromised away.

In society, surrealist activity may be ignored, or ridiculed, or attempted to be absorbed into the cultural market, and perhaps typically all three at the same time. The absorbant culture will want to represent it as part of its own supply, framed and packaged in specialised genres, tastes, professions and hobbies, and judge it by its own standards and reward those who are compliant, and this will of course be quite suffocating and demoralising for creative adventure. But since this entire framework is actually so alien to the meaning of the activity and the creativity itself, it’s also the case that a vigilant application of simple autogestion tends to be a spontaneous and sufficient response: declining calls for official submissions and offers of official representation, establishing self-controlled channels, where surrealism is a broad quest on a particular weird ship, and not a cultural brand.

Surrealism rests on a break with the avantgarde, and is founded in its own type of synthesis, never comfortably at home in any level of locally available scene or market. Any local activity, as well as any partaking individual, sooner or later needs to take leave of remaining loyalties with such available forums.

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Maybe continue collaborating with them, but not confusing them with surrealism, which is something distinct, with a particular integrity, at times to the point of elusiveness.

Historically, it was a break with the avantgarde and to a minor extent specifically with the Dada experiment (which does appear in a linear storytelling as the avantgarde’s final moment), even though most people didn’t realise that – and especially not in peripheral countries where the avantgarde was only just starting up and Dada and surrealism both became just part of the mix, and the break had to come only later.

And so individually, it remains a break with available alternatives too.

The individual stories have similarities. Those activists who are not merely interested in art too but instead are disillusioned with activism but not with its aims, those artists who are seriously fed up with the art world and its limited outlook, those literateurs who are deeply suspicious about literature, those scholars who never wanted to try a way inside the institutions – they were already on the verge, in the position to make a break and pool in with a different type of project. If a local presence or just chance is there to suggest surrealism it is an obvious incarnation of such a project and the journey may begin. Whereas others will have to make a concerned effort to break into the enchanted world.

But that little leap is in a way immediately available too, for sure, since as long as a crowd of hangarounds

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and the curious are not just obvious weights around the ankles, and as long as we are not their exotic entertainers, it makes a lot of sense to collaborate in the activist movements and local underground art forums and poetry scenes, and in certain places perhaps even in the academia and official art scenes, but that’s not where surrealism is. Surrealism is elsewhere, and everybody is welcome to take the leap. And rejoin the historical leap and relive the larval development.

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THE CONCEPT OF THE SURREALIST GROUP The surrealist movement is quite a motley entity, which is notoriously vague in some of its delineations but quite clear in its core meaning. It is built up by a variety of units on different levels, including individuals, groups, journals, subnetworks, etc. But surrealism as such was developed within a surrealist group (not the other way around),1 and the notion and reality of the surrealist group has remained entirely crucial to surrealism. Not only are surrealist groups the core nodes of the surrealist movement, they are also core instances of surrealist activity.

In order to understand this, it is crucial to explore in which way “surrealist group” represents a particular concept within surrealism, which has acquired a rich particular meaning through the experiences of the surrealist movement (and to a lesser extent the theoretical efforts) and is not at all identical with a general lexical sense of the word, non-historical and framework-independent, where just any collective somehow involved with surrealism would be possibly denoted as a “surrealist group”. Thus, understanding the particular sense of “surrealist group” within surrealism is part of the point of departure that separates a more accurate understanding of surrealism from a superficial banalised arthistory-textbook ideological construction.

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The domain of such a concept is easily outlined: A “surrealist group” has to be a “group” and it has to be “surrealist”. But fulfilling those two is not enough. It must also fulfill the particular historical sense of “surrealist group”. This is what integrates it with the concepts and praxises of surrealist activity, surrealist experience, surrealist tradition and the surrealist movement.

Of course, surrealism is made from living experience, and surrealist organisation is a field with a vast variation, depending on, mostly, the historical circumstances at different times and places as well as the passionate input of very different individuals, beside chance and emergent effects. Nevertheless, it also has a typical organisational form developed over a long time between the nodes of an international network of different but remarkably similar intense activities.

It will certainly not benefit surrealism (nor the understanding of it) to be rigid and exclude all untypical organisational forms. On the other hand, it will not benefit any type of activity (or understanding) to give up all conceptual clarity and claim that everybody are equally entitled to a particular designation regardless of contents and characteristics.

A few parentheses concerning method My discussion here is brief and synthetic but firmly based in what I would call three different sets of material. The first one is the indirect empirical, my detailed

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and longlasting study of the history of surrealism through available source material, but also living oral tradition, and published scholarly studies.

The second one is the more direct and simple empirical, my having been part for decades of one surrealist group and in numerous international efforts and temporary groups as well as one active group in another country, as well as having visited and observed as well as taken an active part in meetings and a variety of activities in surrealist groups and groupuscules in a total so far of, hm, 13 cities or regions beside my own, and in discussions and games visiting individuals elsewhere.

The third one is that of having grasped the matter as a distinct issue of particular graveness (a matter of “life and death” if you will) in my own life, in my own practical and theoretical work with organisation in the surrealist movement. This is what would connect the two former with an analytical and imaginative effort on behalf of the clarification and advancement of the thing studied, and thus place the operation on the active side of the demarcation line provided by Marx’s eleventh Feuerbach thesis (epistemologically, but not necessarily historically, since that’s up to history…).

An impassionate and entirely external treatment cannot be expected to grasp what is at stake here at all.

Though an exclusively partisan view (be it theoretical or pragmatical) is likely to miss a lot of the complexity as well as of the actual empirical patterns.

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In this brief discussion of a technical nature I will not go into any discussion of the relationship between the individual and the collective in life and the whole productive sphere of “antihumanist thinking”, nor deliver anecdotes or suggest classifications in specific cases. There is a number of interesting aspects which may merit their own essays, and there is a number of crucial aspects that are best conveyed orally on an eyeto-eye basis. In fact, I am surely spilling way too much already here. But the secrets of the surrealist movement have usually all been openly admitted anyway, and the sense in which they are secrets is more an alchemical or magical one of being readily available but will be understood only by those who are inclined to understand by the readiness to accept a certain departure from their prefabricated distinct categories.

And since these secrets can be openly discussed, the major indiscretion I am committing here is probably that of talking in far too great detail with far too much seriousness and confidence, which may be annoying in itself, or specifically redundant to those with insight while apparently entirely irrelevant in the eyes of those who are still “blind” to the relevance of the topic, for example by considering that surrealism is mostly about art and not about life, or that activity, organisation and group dynamics are soft issues that should be left to each and everyone to handle as they see fit.

But yes, it is indeed perhaps mainly as an implicitly polemical topic that this discussion seems most

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pertinent. Surrealist activity will keep acquiring, and keep sharing, often openly, its experience, without necessarily describing the metaaspects of that activity, and each node of activity is open to choose to collaborate with and include any kind of activity which it finds dynamic and attractive…It is mainly the historiography of surrealism that will have the opportunity to either properly acknowledge or perhaps more commonly disregard and sometimes even stubbornly deny the particular character of collectivity in surrealism.2 This may in turn reinforce certain inaccuracies of circumscription of which instances to consider when discussing surrealist activity.

It is true that there are even surrealists today who will join in with the ununderstanding external commentators and claim that collectivity has played out its role in surrealism, and now it’s every man for himself.

This is usually connected with a desire to downplay the application of surrealism in all areas of life and the sense of it as a living movement, or merely with rationalising one’s own position for individuals who live more isolated or are less extrovert, or of adapting to the scholars’ reconstruction of surrealism (rather than the other way around), or pehaps represent a hysterically obedient deference to Schuster’s 1969 dissolution of the Paris group… On the whole, it takes place among several other hasted “updates” of surrealism that rush ahead and claim that one or the other key aspect of surrealism is suddenly no longer relevant

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in present society. Since some such updates may be quite relevant, it remains important to point out that not all are, and that each case needs to be addressed with an explicit argumentation preferrably including an empirical assessment that the particular element is in fact not widely in use anymore for necessary or dynamic purposes.

Also, for surrealists it is actually not entirely crucial to have an explicit circumscription of the movement, since it is up to everyone to collaborate which whom they want.3 Whereas a scholarly study of surrealism needs to pick its study objects accurately, especially if it is going to try to formulate generalisations of course. But again, for historical or scholarly purposes, any such demarcation will be tangled by its own rigidity and become rather useless unless it recognises simultaneously a historical core, an emic core, and a width of variation of forms which needs to be subjected to criteria suitable for the particular exploration. I am just saying that the scholar has a much more tough job here, since in her/his case the study area has to be established by way of explicit and reproducable operations, while the active surrealist is already in the middle of it, doesn’t need any of that, and may act on informed intuition and the dynamics of the situation. The scholar is in no position to make such intuitive or casual assessments, and when she/he keeps doing it anyway, their results typically become largely irrelevant.

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Historically, no doubt any discussion of the concept of the surrealist group must take into account and make sure to cover first the experience of the Paris group 1922-39 and 1946-69. But in order to become an actual concept it will have to be generalised from this “type instance”. Thus, it will have to continue by considering the experience of the also remarkably longlived, rich, authoritative and integrity-rich Prague group, and that of the efforts to continue the activity of the Paris group through especially the La Main à Plume group during the war and the Liaison surréaliste and consequitive GPMS group after 1969. And that of the Chicago group, and finally necessarily also that of the rest of the set of core groups currently still extant dating back from the 70s through.4 Then it becomes critical to account in one way or another for a large number of distinct and more or less central but in certain respects clearly aberrant groups,5 as well as very active but more shortlived groups – in order to make sure, as we’ve said, not to water down the criteria of a surrealist group into nothingness, but to be able to identify a collective surrealist activity as such and acknowledge which characteristics are more important than others for the coherence of the concept of the surrealist group.

So in order to discuss the criteria of a surrealist group, I have tried to tackle this diversity by considering three levels of embodying the concept of a surrealist group. At all times, level one, the understanding of the

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concept must be primarily based on the “core groups” and their characteristics and experiences. Then, level two, there are various kinds of explicit surrealist groups that are small, partial, new, odd, dissident and/or just elusive, which typically are part of the surrealist movement and contribute to surrealism’s experience, and which represent recurring tests as to how far the criteria of surrealist groups can be stretched. And finally, level three, there are the fundamentally problematic cases of collective activities which do not explicitly designate themselves as surrealist, which makes it problematic to find the right criteria to assess to what extent they might be surrealist groups. These are often referred to as “parasurrealist” or “surréalisants” or “surrealist despite the letter”, and their own subjective relationship to surrealism vary widely and include for example very specific disclaimers, non-committal vagueness, or unproblematic adherence only without explicit claims.

It is not crucial for an activity itself, if it has its own dynamics and productivity, whether it qualifies as a “surrealist group” in the historical sense. And it is equally not crucial to specify this before deciding upon collaborations (trust and mutual curiousness would be based on other factors anyway). Primarily, the flora of such non-core groups represents a rich array of cases of “’surrealist groups sensu lato’ but not ’surrealist groups sensu stricto’” which allows us to map the variation within surrealist organisation and what factors

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govern that variation, to look for the crucial constants in surrealist activity, and to acknowledge the diversity of surrealist organisation without watering down the more demanding and if you will esoteric sense within surrealism of the crucial concept of surrealist group.

Fulfilling the “group” part of “surrealist group” A surrealist group has a simple formal structure and it is at least theoretically possible to list its members, and if so according to a typically non-explicit set of inner and formal criteria. There are typically several explicit members, and typically a wide or narrow zone of probably-members or sometimes-members with relationships which are tested or negotiated at each occasion when explicit membership is asked for; there is also a distinct periphery of contacts with a more or less passionate collaboration and more or less potential to step up to a more active role under certain circumstances. The exact structure is of course up to each activity itself to develop or even invent, usually implicitly far more than explicitly, as is the division of labour and the criteria for “safety of the spirit” including a possible local code of conduct. A structure is a structure even when you are not aware it’s there, of course.

Many surrealist groups may be too small or too shortlived to fulfill this exact description, which is a

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very normal thing once you go outside the circle of core groups. Sometimes such a group is small enough to represent a tightly collaborating unit which may ignore thinking about membership criteria at all. And in some small groups working within a particular field, it might be the specific set of a few particular individuals collaborating that is what constitutes a group and its identity (like a bandname). But if the delimitation of the group is based on a particular task rather than on the included individuals, it will probably be a group only in a very formal sense and not be able to fulfill the sense of being a surrealist group. Here, an artist group, activist group, poet group, musical group, psychonaut group or reading group might possibly be a surrealist group or at least interesting to consider under this heading, whereas an editorial group or a committee will usually not have the activity nor the identity to make it similar to a surrealist group, unless it specifically assumes a broader activity and a concern with its own identity.

A fleeting collective activity without identifiable members is an instance of collective activity which may uphold an identity, but it is not a group. This is in fact not uncommon, among for example informal circles of friends who would occasionally get together for games, collective painting, discussing surrealist topics, or perhaps editing a journal or a webpage or arranging exhibitions, but not considering themselves a group, and indeed not quite being one in the absence of an

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organisational form and a membership. It is also not uncommon to have a “surrealist wing” experimenting and discussing together within a broader group, such as an underground art group or a political group, or (as was very often the case in earlier times) a modernist art group or alliance. As long as the delineation of such a wing is variable and there is no selfunderstanding as a unit, this does not constitute a group either, even though it is indeed a collective surrealist activity.

Fulfilling the “surrealist” part of “surrealist group” A core surrealist group is, somewhat circularly, characterised by being recognised as such within the movement. Such a group is well aware of not just standing in the tradition of surrealism and defending surrealism, but actually embodying surrealism at the current time and place, and making experiences on behalf of it. Typically it is also interested in explicating its explorations and standpoints in terms of instances of surrealism, and sometimes this indeed comes to nagging about the label, and obsessing over the exact boundaries of its application. A core surrealist group is also characterised by its longevity, by representing a lasting and reliable node in the movement over several decades. Continuously or at least for particular periods it typically has a public outlet, which fulfills a function as one of the main voices of contemporary surrealism

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on the international level (but as a particular forum becomes longlived it very often also becomes a more tedious chore to edit and its contents and form more predictable and in that sense a less striking expression than new and temporary initiatives of where surrealism is going and is discovering itself).

A surrealist group in a more general sense (outside the core groups) recognises itself standing in the surrealist tradition and will defend surrealism, but may not be explicit or even aware of actually embodying it, and it may or may not take an active part in the surrealist movement in terms of communication and collaboration. Many groups are too small, too shortlived, too silent, too inactive, too eclectic and unreliable, too mystificationist, too narrowly focused on only one area of activity, or possibly too controversial and non-constructive, to assume the appearance of a core node (whereas once established, it is quite possible to be highly controversial or mystificationist, or silent and even dormant for long periods).

But a group does not need to identify itself as surrealist to fulfill the function. An objectively surrealist group need not have an active relationship to the label at all, it depends only on upholding a collective activity which can be considered a surrealist activity. Thus identifying it is dependent on interpretation. In many cases, such groups may take part in surrealist collaborations as well as defend and explore surrealism, and perhaps members may consider themselves surrealists

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but the group as such operates under another label, and in those cases it is rather unproblematic to call it an objectively surrealist group. In other cases, recognising an objectively surrealist group will have to rely on explicit criteria of what constitutes a collective surrealist activity, or on intuition. Often such groups are referred to as “parasurrealist” groups, which is a very broad term.6 It appears usually quite futile to debate whether a certain group or entire fringe movement is objectively surrealist or not unless one is able to converge on criteria, which will have to be based on recognising surrealist activity as such – rather than rely on the subjective relationship among its agents to surrealism as a label.

The geographical and social basis of a surrealist group A surrealist group is based in a city, typically a capital or a regional center, but also organises a geographical periphery of satellite individuals and even groupuscules. Such satellites will partake in activities from afar or on a visiting basis, as will visiting surrealists from other countries and other activities. In a sense there is currently an ongoing shift here, where core groups were earlier often expected to be more of organisation units on a national level (and still are, locally), while it has become much more common (though it existed since long ago) a certain element of geographically

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overlapping groups and loyalties based on ”selective affinities” where individuals associate more with groups whose particular spirit they feel kindred to even if based far away. But despite the accessibility of online communication, real travelling and visiting remains crucial to discover and explore such selective affinities. The group has a local contact network within the areas of activity of its interest, such as artist networks, political networks or intellectual networks, and individuals from these specialised networks will be part of the groups periphery. Even more importantly, the physical urban setting exposes the group to a more or less frequent stream of chance encounters, in terms of people as well as events and opportunities, which creates a body of shared unusual experience. The activities of the group within its city tends to explore and mythologise the environment.

Many surrealist groups that are too small or too shortlived will of course not fulfill the entirety of this description. Some groups are less open due to their own assessment of the necessities of their integrity, and of course some groups have been more or less clandestine given political circumstances – but usually this is only seemingly, since a group may expect more from chance encounters than from most people approaching via public channels anyway. Anyway, it is quite possible at least for a non-core group to have a particular, more rigid organisational basis and not being open to newcomers and visitors. They may be

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secret societies or siblinghoods with particular membership tests, or they may be specialised organisations for surrealists with a particular interest in common, or for exiled surrealists originating from a certain country or region, or for surrealists of a particular language, gender or age. Of course such a circumscription of the outlook creates an untypical situation and certain problems as to the identity of the group, and it is up to any such activity to develop responses to those unanswered questions (or, if the activity as such is fulfilling for its purposes, up to its potential collaborators to interpret it).

A collective activity which does not have a geographical center and does not meet physically, may have a fruitful collaboration and be a group in many senses, but not in the sense that has been developed within the surrealist movement for what constitutes a “surrealist group”. It may be based on a personal affinity or on an online platform, but it will then typically be a union of personal friends, or a taskforce for a particular activity, or most likely a network for collaborations and discussions (those forms are clearly available also for groupings who do meet…). Such a grouping will be able to limit itself to whatever it volontarily chooses to regard as its area of activity, and will not be subjected to exposure to the same amount of chance encounters and the same width of life circumstances, will not be an embodiment of the tradition and spirit of surrealism facing the spontaneous living

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dialectics of membership and surroundings, of personal attractions and repellations, of controlled and uncontrolled contacts and commitments, of emerging directions. Since those aspects of group life and group experience are crucial to the concept of the surrealist group, calling such a group a surrealist group is a deliberate stretch of the term in its historical sense, and while there is clearly no instance around to forbid it, the designation seems to rest on either a polemical point that would seem to beg for explicit argumentation, or simply a terminological sloppiness.

The identity and activity of a surrealist group A surrealist group meets more or less regularly. It is very common among core groups with a pattern of mostly informal weekly meetings at a regular café, bar or pub, and additional experiments or meetings for particular tasks elsewhere and outside the regular schedule – but of course this varies tremendously depending on circumstances. They may be for example less frequent, more frequent, more irregular, more differentiated into different forms for different tasks, more formalised, or less circumscribed on the whole. Activity typically consists of games and experiments, discussions and planning, reports and anecdotes, and often confusion, joking, poetic associations and interpretations to the point of delirious silliness. A core group which is somehow established

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in its geographical and social situation will necessarily be involved in rather broad set of areas of interest of their own choice, such as theory, art, poetry, music, politics, etc, and those areas may be more or less reflected in the regular meetings of the group. The communication, gossip and collaboration with surrealists elsewhere usually plays a role but it may be smaller or bigger. Editorial work concerning channels of outlet for the activity such as journals and webpages may be a smaller or bigger part of the regular meeting, or have its own forum. Walking very often appears as a crucial vehicle of the surrealist experience. For some, drinking seems crucial. Clearly, it is important that there is a sense of commitment and solidarity within the group, that comes both from a deliberate choice and spontaneously from the shared unusual experiences, but typically it remains open to newcomers, and it varies widely within groups how much effort is put into drawing demarcations towards outsiders and identifying and keeping at bay objective enemies.

While efforts may be made to creatively use the personal idiosyncracies and accomodate the disclaimers of newcomers or to broaden contact surfaces to local environments, it is however crucial that a shameless core of poetic playfulness, of nonconformism and of the surrealist tradition is not being compromised with – surrealist activity can not live up to fulfilling what external parties expect it to provide from their own perspective, it cannot become a voted average or

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“least common denominator” of the expectancies of each volontary curious person taken together, it must always remain something odd, a strange experience, something largely useless or at least very unwieldy for all personal and/or external purposes of for example political campaigning, artist name marketing, or personal therapy.

A crucial point is that the activity of regularly meeting as a collective within the framework of surrealism allows for (usually cannot help) affecting the everyday life of its participants also outside the group and the meetings, disenveloping objective chance, allowing reinterpretations, prompting interventions.

Also, sooner or later it gives rise to an emergent irreducible collective spirit that is different from the sum of the individuals. Whereas it is the formal commitment of being a solid node of the surrealist movement which makes an activity embody the sense of being a local embodiment of surrealism and assume the right and necessity to be, to explicate, to develop and to reinvent surrealism, it is the emergence of the collective spirit that confirms this as a part of the major historical and ahistorical entity and leads its adventures into the unknown.

Again, it could be emphasised that physically meeting up is not only crucial to the emergence of the collective spirit (and beneficial for a mosaique of interpersonal relationships, creative collaborations and interventions among the participants), but also crucial

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for encouraging emergent and chance events affecting collective activity, both at the (usually public) meeting site, and on each participant’s way to and from the meeting, and that is what perhaps most obviously situates it within the realm of everyday life experience.

Also, a mere circle of friends can be a group and it may be concerned with surrealism, but it doth not a surrealist group make. Certainly, friendship plays an important part in the internal dynamics and in the solidarity and sense of integrity externally. But a circle of friends is dependent on how socially comfortable they are with one another, and shared history is a reason for concern of top priority, so that the struggle of maintaining, caring for, and repeating comforting social rituals with one’s old friends will stand in the way of bold steps, uncensored talk, confrontations and new efforts suggested by disenveloping dynamics. In a surrealist group, the cohesion has another type of foundation (a sense of urgency, passionate attraction, task, adventure, perhaps best likened to a “devil’s contract”) in order to step up to the historical role, and the solidarity and playfulness is typically not dependent on individual participants’ social preferences or on concern for bonds forged externally and before. Especially, new explorers and necessities of the moment may be much more relevant than old friends. It is quite possible to be active in a group without being personally friendly with any individual participants – and it is rather unavoidable that a deep sense of friendship

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too develops between people who share unusual experiences (and also rather common – but far from universal – that a sense of friendship is instantaneous between fellow surrealists that had never met before). 7 So, depending on the particular interests, capabilities and desires of the participants, but actually even more by the structure of the group’s experiences, and the sensibility of the emergent objective spirit, a surrealist group acquires a more or less original direction and a set of personality traits and quirks. Such original directions may be laughed at, satirised or criticised by other surrealists, but on the whole they are respected or even silently revered since they really represent different sense organs of surrealism as such. Surrealism has use for a diversity of sense organs, in fact as many as possible as long as they don’t actually compromise its integrity.

It is typically in these respects that a core group (or a new very active group that may or may not stay long enough to become a core group) differs from other groups, which may be specialised on just one or two areas of activity, which they may have quite an efficient focus on. Thus, many of the aspects of manifesting surrealism historically is so much easier for core groups. They have a structure which encourages circumstancial and emergent effects or, so to speak, a creative, collective and if you will productive use of abundant casual, extraindividual, non-utilistic and non-productive dynamics. It may be much

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less efficient than a specialised group but it will typically have more personality in itself and affect life a lot more. Thus it will contribute more to surrealist experience, it will be more connected with the transformation of everyday life and with the recognition and exploration of the unknown. And it’s as simple as that what surrealism is all about.

Notes: 0

Novelty and originality are not important criteria here, so I am not at all

ashamed that this text may be found to largely repeat, in a slightly new context, the points made in “The Surrealist group as an Individual and an Organisation” on (icecrawler.blogspot.com) 2011 nor the regrettably not widely accessible “The Group” hidden in the 2019 International Encyclopedia of Surrealism.

1

I don’t know if it is a controversial description to state that surrealism

was developed within a group and not the other way around. No doubt the surrealist group was there before Breton summarised their outlook in the manifesto 1924, it was clearly not a lone wanderer’s manifesto which attracted subsequent adherents to form a group. Of course Breton’s personality and sense of scheming had a crucial role for determining surrealism’s direction, but it was based on the collective experience, on a sense of joint departure from conventional concerns and conventional life, and specifically on a couple of collective discoveries, from the very beginning. The real unsettled question is whether the Litérature group became a surrealist group in 1922 when it abandoned Dada and shifted its collective basis to a new sense of experimentation under the name of surrealism (as I would argue), or whether it already was one from 1919 as it began to gather the elements avant la lettre.

2

While there are numerous accounts of group life as such in surrealism,

there are strikingly few texts that stress the importance of the special nature

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of collectivity for surrealism. This is mostly in a few declarations and polemical texts from the Paris and Prague groups, as well as more recently from for example Stockholm, Leeds and SLAG groups. Among secondary commentators (academics and critics), it is mainly a few that have been very close to the movement who have called attention to this point. In that sense, it is clearly one of surrealism’s public “secrets”.

3

There have been cases where a particular initiative or invitation within

surrealism would claim to address or would want to represent the entire movement, and I just hasten to point out parenthetically that this is hardly attained with open calls on social media or mass emails. The circumscription of the movement as such is not a matter to be left to voluntarism, chance, or the preferences of the initiative-taker. The core nodes that represent unambiguous surrealist groups may need to be approached with individualised communications and actual discussion about circumstances – and still, in most cases some groups will not take the bait anyway, as it has developed a praxis in some groups to regard the act of turning down requests as a manifestation of the group’s sense of integrity…

4

Thus, additional rather unproblematic core groups from this period seem to

be organisational stalwarts and sometimes mavericks Madrid, Leeds, Stockholm, whereas already São Paulo and Buenos Aires are both somewhat less transparent and have a slightly more complicated history, while a certain number of groups have similar characteristics but not yet quite the longevity…

5

Obvious or particularly crucial deviant or problematic groups would include

the Belgian group/groups and some iterations of the English group, as well as, I would say, at least the Alabama group and the Group Surreal-network in the US. 6

Under the “parasurrealist” label we see a range from explicit surrealist

groups which are oppositional to or merely independent of a core surrealist group operating in the same area – over groups that explicitly abandon their attachment to surrealism while maintaining some or all the parts of actual surrealist activity – to specialised or isolated groups working in accordance with certain historic characteristics of surrealism at a particular time and place.

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7

It is quite striking in the history of surrealism, that for many groups it is

only when two circles of friends (or more) are fused, rubbed against each other, and mixed, that the group is “born” in a significant sense and its objective spirit becomes distinct. As long as it is a single tight group of friends that engage in surrealist activity together, they can still go on with their usual external idiosyncracies together, and it is only when confronted with the ways of other people, who discovered surrealism some other way and started implementing it independently, that the necessary departure from the already known is possible and thus a way of incarnating surrealism is discovered. This instance is for the Paris group quite obvious with the fusion of the Littérature group and the Aventure group (plus a broad set of Dada artists and troubled individuals). Similar instances in other groups are often crucial to the group’s internal mythology or not.

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A blistering blueprint torn from several angles Open letter to academic students of surrealism

1. We share a passion. But we are on different sides of a fence. We started off with some kind of negotiating back in ’66 in Cerisy under the recognition that we represented very different approaches to the same topic but possibly should be able to talk to each other – but then our party weakened and was fragmented and turned to focusing on more underground activity, and you thought you were being left alone and unsurveilled so you got cocky. Now it’s gone pretty far, many of us are either desperate or innocent enough to even play along with you entirely on your terms, and many of you have joined our collaborations and collectives probably without properly realising that there was a fence to jump.

Ah but there was, and it was crucial. The “Feuerbach Fence”, if you will. Whether to be content with just interpreting the world, or impatiently trying to put anything to use as a tool of change. Making something a topic for a publication, or integrating it as a component in one’s grappling with life. Surrealism rests on a departure. Surrealism keeps emerging as an abandonment of concerns for its usefulness in cultural categories within bourgeois ideology, we do not wish to find ourselves places within art, literature, politics 61

and scholarship, we do not wish to reform said fields, we want to change the world and transform life.

This may be either difficult or easy to grasp, but it clearly provides a demarcation line, and it may make things more difficult for you. A living topic seems to demand a special kind of seriousness and modesty, if working as you do under an imperative to be impartial, transparent, consequential, unambiguous and provide references. Things look different from the other side and a lot of this may be inaccessible to you. Having living surrealists claiming to practice and embody the thing makes it so much more difficult to do a neat autopsy. Furthermore, it tends to make us ungrateful.

Since we are not particularly eager to have our movement committed to an easily circumscribed and easily summarised functional part in art history or whichever humanities subdiscipline, we’re not appeased just by someone saying something nice about surrealism.

Because the nice that is being said is typically for all kinds of wrong reasons and objectively working to lay surrealism to rest.

I am not picking a fight here. I am just trying to point out that our positions are objectively different and are connected with different sets of commitments and freedoms. So please note too, that this is not about what type of “representativity” the author of this text might have or lack with regards to the surrealist movement, since I am merely trying to point out the consequences of the difference in the objective positions here.

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We could still try to have a discussion, of course.

We might force each other to clarify our concepts and conclusions. We might direct each other to certain relevant authors or fields of enquiry. But you would be happier if we simply weren’t there (if the corpse wasn’t talking back, especially if confidently so), and we would be happier if you would focus more on something that was in fact directly useful and constructive in the long term.

2. So, please do a bit more empirical work and a little less interpretative work. This is useful for everybody and not just for your own career.

There is really still a lot to be dug up and clarified about who many persons in the history of surrealism were, and what many surrealist activities were actually doing, what the networks looked like, where the funding came from, and even what backgrounds some famous surrealists came from. Whatever is found while doing empirical groundwork can be useful from all kinds of perspectives, by all kinds of people, all over the world, for a long time ahead. For us, insight into circumstances, details of activities, and perphaps people’s backgrounds contribute to the experience and allows us to further some lines of experimentation that were dropped. For you, it gives you the opportunity to ask more questions, more informed questions, and more answerable questions, and specifically also to dismiss poor hypotheses and interpretations based

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on various mistaken and trivialising assumptions. And not the least, in the larger perspective, making data available is meaningful for the future since they make become useful in types of explorations which simply have not yet been thought of.

Whereas all these interpretations and reinterpretations are often very schematic, crude and repetitive.

Interpretations and reinterpretations can be important too, of course, but mainly if done with vast background knowledge, and either a remarkable sensibility or a particularly clever employment of method, and with a certain modesty and actual critical evaluation concerning the results. But all too often it is just an exercise in employing standard methods or just an excuse to get an opportunity to write about a particular work without actually adding anything at all that hasn’t been said before or which is just pointless or which diminishes rather than opens up the contents of that work. All these little observations based on standard more or less popular psychology, on recognition of influences from within the cultural canon, how often do they actually clarify, open up, and facilitate use of a particular work or a body of work? Not too often. Such trivial observations may earn you a degree or a particular grant, but no one is interested in reading them and they do not contribute to knowledge in any meaningful way.

Perhaps I don’t need to say here that reinterpretations in the light of a general advancement of certain

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critical angles may need to be done across the board.

An obvious example is of course looking at gender strategies. This does not mean that anything said from an antisexist (or anticolonial, etc) perspective is automatically valid – you still need to consider the width of historical circumstances and sensibly consider both openings and obstacles, what was (and is) possible and what was not, for which reasons. Perhaps I don’t need to say here that many particular instances of interpretation can be quite meaningful too, but for individual works, campaigns and tendencies usually when considering them in the light of the surrealist aims and the surrealist experience on the whole, integrating observations from various genres and areas of expression (you know that pictorial art, poetic text, theory, politics, games, music, film, occultism, anthropology etc are not at all as separated for us as they are for you who work within a structure built on specialisation and on partitioning reality into distinct fields), or applying knowledge from other disciplines and sectors which were not obvious to be relevant and thus may reveal things, and doing it sensibly with a degree of selfreflection and criticism. Some people can do it.

Perhaps I don’t need to say all this, because I am just trying to make the point that it would be so nice and so useful if the standard student thesis was about digging up and clarifying an empirical material rather than providing one more redundant and unoriginal interpretation of a work.

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3. Please exercise some powers of discrimination within your own field, and openly criticise those who do crappy groundwork, pointless interpretations, get basic facts just wrong, or exert an ill hidden aversion and hostility towards the subject that only allows them to see things from a particular viewpoint. Despite the competitive nature of the business, there seems to be quite a widespread “esprit de corps” or embarrassment or just lame powerlessness and it is rather unusual (at least from an external viewpoint) to see fellow scholars simply dismissing scholarly nonsense-talkers, and that the rare such dismissals that do occur don’t really take, and the really bad work keeps popping up and being referred to over and over again.

Come on, no more letting straightforward mistakes and sloppiness due to personal agendas just pass, no more confusing women with the same first name, no more mixing up tragic fates of one and the other, no more this or that person was a stalinist who clearly wasn’t, no more mixing up different 1924 publications, different declarations on similar topics, different positionings and dialogues at different times visavis Freud, or the Communist Party, no more surrealism abandoned politics in the 30s, no more Nadja is a novel, no more surrealists hate music, no more surrealism died a particular year, no more CG Jung was a crucial influence on Breton, no more Bataille was as much a leader of the surrealist movement, no more considering some voices as devastating critics of surrealism at dates

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when they were still active in the movement, nor on the other hand considering second thoughts of long renegades as official and representative statements for surrealism, no more Cocteau was a surrealist, no more Breton was just a boring oaf and a misogynist and a cowardly control-freak who just wanted to rule over people, no more surrealism is misogynistic at core, no more dismissing postwar surrealism as a few old men with a lot of unoriginal pupils and parrots, etc etc etc.

4. So for overall methodology, please study primary texts more than secondary texts. With so much poor scholarship having been produced, it tends to perpetuate itself objectively, keeping itself and its involuntary or malicious myths alive by the combination of scholarly methodology (that you should be aware of what has been done in your topic) and the lack of powers of critical discrimination as to what is reliable and what is not.

It is primary material, sources directly forged within surrealist activity, that makes most sense for situating concepts, concerns, aims and strategies in surrealism. It would be very nice and rather clarifying if a reference to a source text, which actually confirms the occurence within surrealism, would take a larger place than the references to standard secondary works repeating or paraphrasing or interpreting the things that were said in the source text, and doing so correctly or incorrectly, with a certain bias.

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Then, beside that, there is of course autobiographical sources, which are problematic and very useful too.

They are based in firsthand experience and are very useful for getting circumstances and frames of mind correct, but of course, they also display an individual’s struggle to cope with this experience, often struggling to forcefully rationalise and delineate things that would otherwise still be pertinent and challenging, often reconstructing a single official version where things are actually still unsettled, often specifically aimed to rationalise a person’s abandoning surrealist activity, or their convictions that surrealism is not there anymore, or, on the other hand, nostalgically idealising the oh so alive surrealist years in life, which allows for just as bad rationalisations but still far more proper recognising of the impact and potential of lived situations. An autobiographical source is always a source for what it is talking about as well as for the struggle to rationalise the experience by the person talking.

It often remains far more useful for enlightening a reader on what surrealism is about than a bundle of standard historiographical sources cooked up by critics or by academics.

Actually, a proper critical study of secondary texts would be rather useful on the whole if it would clearly point out which of these secondary sources are not reliable and if it would lead students to stop repeating the same types of schematic interpretations and the same types of not-so-original revelations, regardless of

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whether eternal and completely trivial or just fashionable and simplified….

5. Please stick to a historical sense of surrealism, and do not establish your own original or not-so original interpretations of a much wider circumscription and a rather different content – unless you do it consciously, for the sake of a particular exploration, argue well for it, and evaluate your results. Sure, Bataille and surrealism have a highly intriguing relationship, but all the interesting things highlighted by the arguments for and against a certain circumscription in that case will never be considered by those who are all for liberal inclusions from the beginning. Surrealism is clearly part of the outlook of various popculture icons like David Lynch, Jodorowsky, Topor & Arrabal, Kate Bush, Dario Argento, HR Giger, William S Burroughs, Monty Python, but they hardly represent just as much surrealism as the surrealists who developed surrealism and maintained it in the surrealist movement. It is the historical origins that make up a type case, which everything that you want to include in the same concept will have to be compared with, and especially in terms of perspective, aim, attitude, dynamics and framework, not so much in terms of particular similarities in imagery and references, because that might be a trivial case of direct or indirect influence. Any liberal urge to let anything be a case of a particular concept too, hardly contributes to the clarification of that concept, unless

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you actually develop a set of criteria based on the historical case, and is true to its origins and related to its historical development.

6. Please modestly realise that there is very little room for you to be creative, to develop surrealism, and to make new discoveries for surrealism, in your academic forums. These are things that surrealists do as part of surrealist activity, which goes on on the other side of the fence. If you are trying to do it without being part of a movement and a spiritual framework, it remains freely floating without an actual connection, there is no one there to assimilate it in a collective experience and play with it and further it, it has no foundation and it has no actual audience, it does not quite have a framework to make sense or not make sense. Also, it tends to be methodologically vague, non-reproducable and more or less arbitrary from the viewpoint of your own discipline, so it is indeed usually poor scholarship.

On the other hand, the unearthing and further exploration of those surrealist precursors that are being integrated into surrealism as parts of surrealist activity only, might clearly be a kind of meeting ground. Several of the surrealists do significant parts of this digging with a scholarly method, where some use and some would perhaps benefit from using certain academic tools – whereas those academics that unravel the hidden histories, connections and

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biographies are indeed far more useful to surrealism than those who focus on the surrealists themselves!

7. And please modestly realise that the academic framework is not a particularly favorable position for forwarding radicalness. Indeed, there have been numerous efforts and attempts to turn the university into a stronghold of resistance and a place for developing useful radical theory and even practices, and locally it has even worked, mostly in the past, but perhaps somewhere even today. Nowadays in most places it is far more difficult, not the least since an institutional position is strongly associated with a heavy load of administrative tasks as well as productivity demands in terms of either research published or number of students processed and passed. And sure, being something of a retirement home for former activists may make sections of academia a pleasant breathing space in contrast to several other environments, but hardly an active stronghold of struggle.

Clearly, if the stronghold thing works, this objectively situates that academic work on the activist side of the Feuerbach fence too, it is about changing the world and transforming life. Clearly, this has been done mainly within social sciences, where methodological and conceptual rigor are crucial tools for understanding and thus being able to change things, so that the expectancies from within the discipline and those from external more urgent concerns may

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actually go hand in hand. The overall topic of these disciplines is the society we live in, and thus partake in and contribute to maintaining. Then reinterpretation, furthered vigilance, questioned behavioral standards, and exposure of power relationships may contribute to actually change things.

Whereas surrealism is a different type of activity and depends much more on the irreproducable and elusive, of facing and welcoming ambiguity and the unknown, of relying on chance and involontary and emergent effects and free associations, and thus clearly ill-fitting within an academic framework, since it is rather an opposite of the academic method. And if someone wants to “reform” the academic standards so as to be able to accomodate these operations too, this actually means watering down the academic method so much that it becomes quite useless and lacks a raison d’etre. There might be single examples where university funding has been succesfully diverted to playing surrealist games, instigating exciting experimentation, and pursuing surrealist theory together with students, which may perhaps even facilitate learning, but this is then entirely outside academic standards and technically a case of embezzlement, which is not a bad thing.

8. Please consider surrealist experience as one of the crucial aspects of surrealism. To the surrealists, it is surrealist experience much more than surrealist texts and artworks which is what is being produced

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by surrealist activity and surrealist creativity. In a sense, this is accessible to everybody if you step back a little bit from your preconceived expectations and categories – but in another sense, it is indeed to a certain extent inaccessible for those who remain on the wrong side of the fence. Clearly, a surrealist can claim anything based on surrealist experience, whereas a surrealism scholar cannot (or at least shouldn’t be able to) claim very much at all, since the scholar needs a reference (and hopefully not just a reference but some kind of critical overview).

Anyway, not just the insight of being informed by surrealist experience, but the recognition that surrealist experience may be a crucial part of what surrealism is, is very often what is blatantly missing in scholarly reconstructions of surrealism. To some extent this must be so, but it would also be very much easier for the scholar to say something insightful and relevant about surrealism if ready to recognise the crucialness of experience, to apply a certain modesty and realise what it is that it might be missing that separates their own schematic and inflexible reconstruction of surrealism from active living surrealism. But then, it is in fact not at all impossible to make surrealist experience a topic of scholarly exploration too, which has been done and is being done by some, but then it is a bit paradoxical, and demands a very sensitive approach, and is certainly not an avenue open to everybody.

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9. Please remember that your discipline too is a historical phenomenon with a studiable trajectory. Sure, the scattered scholarly commentary on surrealism had been around for a long time, but as an academic discipline it was quite new when the invitation went out to the colloqium of Cerisy 1966 (and the first specialised journal of yours came the same year). A crucial year, and there are different ways of interpreting the symbolism of it being the year of Breton’s death.

There are of course alternative frameworks for scholarly activity, all with their own conditions and histories, and varying relationships and fates visavis the university world. There has been café intellectuals, workers movement intellectuals and various popular movement intellectuals and activist struggle intellectuals, intellectual critics who were usually either journalists or creative writers themselves, editors, curators, etc. Universities were often but one among many bases for scholarly activity, usually rather difficult to attain as well as not particularly attractive…

In the French context for example, surrealism is one of several movements that maintained a completely extra-academic organisation (unlike for example the structuralists, existentialists, marxists, poststructuralists, postmodernists…) which has been important to its integrity (and also probably the reason why it was never widely recognised as for example a philosophy?).

So you were just establishing yourselves as a collective agent in 1966 when we were weakened by a

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major crisis. And indeed you have grown since, both in the sense that your discipline has spread over the world and involves a lot of students these days, and that standards have gone up a bit and actually many of you get basic facts right and some of you say really interesting things – both of which probably have to do with the fact that it has become much more difficult to be an extra-academic scholar these days. Much more places than before ask for a diploma. Many traditional platforms for intellectual discussion and exploration have been strangled (while many new forums are in some respects far less serious). Those critics who still keep a job are very often either sensationalist clowns struggling across several media to be “influencers”, or just academics with a somewhat wider interface. Of course it is a good thing that the universities nowadays have a broader base of recruitment, but when they are also supposed to deliver a larger part of the scholarly discourse on the whole, it seems quite obvious that this discourse on a societal level has a narrowed focus due to the particular standards and methods as well as the culture and power structure of academia.

But while you have grown, and perhaps grown comfortably assured of not having your own relevance and legitimacy questioned, we have stayed, and it is still we who so to speak hold the founding documents, as well as the right to stay silent, and thus the right to be elusive, and unrecognisable, and if needed, furious.

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10. So please do not expect the surrealists to conform to your standards of disinterested civilised discussion.

Different sides of the fence, you know. Our secrets may not be secret in a simple sense, it is basically all out in the open if you will, but there are very different perspectives to the secrets of surrealism depending on whether you share the experience and take part or if you don’t. You will probably simply misunderstand what we are doing and why.

For you, surrealism is part of the professional sphere, something which you make or hope to make your living off of, and thus you will have to prove that you and your study of surrealism is nice and competitive and useful for this society – whereas for us, surrealism is the enemy of this society, and when someone wants to pay us for that it is more or less suspicious and probably a bad sign (we might take the money anyway, or at least many of us will under some circumstances, based on a personal calculation of compromises for survival). Your objective aim is to make surrealism something that is containable, understandable, overviewable, and contained, in a scholarly text about it, whereas we on our side do the very opposite, we hope that surrealism is something that will be able to propel us into the unknown at any time and that will metamorphically connect to all aspects of life and reinvent itself and be quite elusive even as it remains quite distinct and recognisable within the framework of our activity and experience.

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When we disagree on something, for you it is just a matter of diverging professional opinion, whereas for us it is about life. When you are clearly wrong about something, it is a professional hazard and you can’t really be expected to have had time to read up on everything, whereas for us you are disrespectfully trying to tangle up the vehicle of our deepest aspirations. Many of us will be angry and rude from time to time, mainly because we are defending our collective quest for another society and for poetry and truth and justice, and it is all a matter of life and death and we see no obligation whatsoever to stick to bourgeois standards of civilised behavior, whereas when you lose your temper, you are just lapsing into unprofessional behavior and in a not so relevant way defending your egos (and perhaps your means of livelihood). And especially, many of us will be “secretive” in the sense that we prefer to have much of our most crucial experiences, and sometimes our entire activities, outside the public eye, with a special and sometimes unintelligable concern for integrity. So if some of you will whine that you prefer the surrealism of the welcoming, regularly publishing and frequently posting surrealists before that of the allegedly obscurantist ones, this is on the one hand an indication that you have misunderstood something crucial about what surrealism is, and on the other hand it is an all too understandable personal feeling but not really an opinion at all since it merely objectively states your objective position on the other side of that fence.

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You are certainly not in a position to correct us, with logical necessity, since you study surrealism and we practise surrealism, meaning that among other things we are actually making it up as we go, which is something that we can do from our perspective but that you cannot do from yours. Of course based on the standards on our side of the fence, we’ll have to stay true to the spirit of the surrealist tradition but also to the immediate demands of the circumstances of our activity in the present, and even if we come up with something seemingly arbitrary or highly controversial among us, it is still objectively part of surrealist activity, and as such it may again be criticised, from the viewpoint of surrealist activity. We might want to get the facts right or not (it is sometimes easier for us, just because we care with more commitment), but you just have to do it because otherwise you are doing a bad job and there is no point in what you are doing. But we can make surrealism do things, consider things, say things, discover things, problematise things, whereas you can not.

To the extent that you are serious, we might still be interested in discussing with you, because that may contribute to clarification of aspects of surrealism and of creativity and methodology and will benefit all. For us, it is something that we would apply in practice to the extent that it is useful. We might, too, enjoy having you contribute to our enquiries, games and experiments, but in the long term we do that in

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the hope that you would eventually be seduced to go over to the dark side, to change masters, to eventually become conjoined explorers in the service of poetry rather than disparate vassals in the service of the bourgeois culture’s selfcongratulating knowledge-production industry that is academia.

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